This is a really interesting thread to read a month later. Of the Clinton kitchen sink that got her a tie for March 4, Sandeep flagged the “representing Obama as Muslim” card, others brought up “experience” and “ready to lead on day 1”, and the “victim card” (which thanks to SNL turned the press into a poodle for a few days)

The Obama campaign is benefiting hugely from its diversity and resulting wisdom of crowds; if you look at its supporters, you see rainbows in one dimension after another: race, age (including those too young to vote), religion, class, language, gender, geography (including internationally) …. It’s a huge advantage over the Clinton campaign and an even bigger one over McCain. This implies that the Obama campaign in generally will do better on their predictions and their performance. Sure enough, the February spreadsheet is an extraordinarily accurate “we’ll do at least this well” prediction, and the campaign has consistently outperformed.

Have any of the analysts, reporters, or bloggers reporting the election picked up on this yet?

And for those who wonder why I’m so enthusiastic about the One Million Strong group on Facebook: it’s the most diverse group of its size of Obama supporters working together that I know of. True, it’s online-only, so people without access to technology aren’t involved; and I’ve seen relatively few over-50s. But geography, race, language, gender, religion (Muslims, Jews, Christians including evangelicals and pro-lifers for Obama, Buddhists, secularists), field and major …

In the tribe discussion, somebody commented “how any of this relates to the obama campaign is beyond me.” here was my reply:

yeah, i guess that wasn’t as clear as it should be. two things:

1) the Obama campaign’s inner circle is a lot more diverse than other campaigns’; so their predictions are likely to be more accurate. this is clearest with respect to somebody like McCain, where the inner circle is all guys, all white (i believe), and largely lobbyists/political strategists. the Clinton campaign has more demographic diversity, but is largely run by long-time associates of Hillary and Bill, so they tend to see things through a very narrow range of opinions.

2) Obama *supporters* are a lot more diverse than other campaigns; so the same effects are likely to happen there.

This is an excellent example of wisdom-of-crowds effects. I had also gotten feedback from a couple of others, mostly variants of “yeah, well said” … none of them had questioned this. The difference: they were all pro-Obama activists, and so familiar with the diversity of the Obama campaign as well as the successes that have come from it. The questioner here comes from a different perspective — exactly the kind of thing Scott Page talks about in terms of “cognitive toolbox”.

Obama’s biggest Facebook supporters’ group, “One Million Strong for Barack Obama” had over 320,000 members (as opposed to Hillary Clinton’s “One Million Strong for Hillary Clinton,” with 5,300); and a growing pool of photographs on Flickr, the photo-hosting online community.

The article also notes challenges, including that “the Internet has its own style of writing and its own social mores” Indeed — hi, trolls! A remarkably good job by Linnie, looking even better almost a year later.

This also means that the Facebook group has been a large diverse community talking and working together for quite a while — getting steadily better at it. So the wisdom-of-crowds effects tend to increase in value. The debunking, convincing, get-out-the-vote, phonebanking, and “know your rights” work is getting more and more efficient; information flow is getting smoother and smoother. On top of that, we were involved in the Double Bubble Trouble voting rights activism, and thanks to Scott Isaacs may well have an even bigger role exposing the election falsification in Ohio.

So of course it’s not like it’s the only place the election is being won … but it’s a major contributor, and an advantage for Obama over both Clinton and McCain that keeps growing over time. Current stats:

One Million Strong for Barack: 497,606 members, 20,943 discussion topics

Hillary Clinton for President – One Million STRONG: 24,405 members; 2170 topics

John McCain for President: 12,894 members, 157 topics

And not to beat things into the ground, but the most recent topics in John McCain for President (“Americans Love War”, “Lieberman Says McCain Ready 24/7 To Be Commander-In-Chief) are a really good example of how groupthink can set in and destroy wisdom of crowds effects when you have a lack of diversity.

The Facebook group “Barack Obama for President in 2008” was created seven months before the Illinois senator actually entered the race and by young people unaffiliated with the campaign. The group grew “at an astonishing rate,” says Famid Sinha, one of its first members. Sinha and others were tapped by the actual campaign to run “Students for Barack Obama,” and the original Facebook group grew to more than 77,000 members. “I think Senator Obama really inspires Americans of all ages,” the 22-year-old replies when asked why the candidate appeals to young people. “But we are usually not engaged in the political process.”

This time around, many of them are engaged and, like the Facebook group, are organizing at a grass-roots level separate from the campaign and with help from the Internet. “We are running this thing on our own,” says Sinha, now the national director of communications for Students for Barack Obama. “I think that’s what a real movement looks like.” Obama has also used the Internet to solicit millions in online campaign donations from his website.

She doesn’t mention the much larger, and equally unofficial, One Million Strong for Barack, and so underestimates the influence of Facebook and of grassroots activism — and Obama’s advantage. My initial reaction is that on the whole the article appears to me to overstate Clinton’s and McCain’s appeal to younger voters, thinking both of the exit polling numbers and the relative size of the Facebook groups above is another indication. The letters posted on McCain’s 23-year-old daughter Meghan’s very-well-done McCainBlogette are full of deserved praise and enthusiasm, but the crowd seems to skew older (“color this 50-year-old Republican impressed”). Then again the guy from the college Republicans seems to think otherwise; he may well know better than me. We shall see.

Good article, and it’s especially interesting to read this article in conjunction with Linnie Rawlinson’s year-old article from London above and Amy Schatz’ BO, U R So Gr8 from the Wall Street Journal … I wonder what paths this has taken through the blogosphere in the interim. The Democratic Strategist has had several thoughtful pieces about this, and Ari Melber had something about Obama’s MySpace delegates in the Nation, but there hasn’t been much. Overall, though, I think the “mainstream media” is actually doing better than the blogosphere on covering the social network aspects of this US Election.

Here’s a picture from McCainBlogette, presumably taken by Meghan or one of the other Blogettes, that I particularly liked: a Republican fund-raiser for her Dad at the Plaza in New York that illustrates some of the challenges the McCain campaign faces finding sufficient diversity to get wisdom-of-crowds effects.

The three things Obama has done incredibly well is, first, he has adopted the language of “wide pockets versus deep pockets” — he’s been getting a lot of little donations rather than a few big donations.

The second change is, he has a class of people creating user-generated videos for him. From the 1984 video to Obama Girl to will.i.am, this is world-class. The pro-Obama stuff on YouTube is not necessarily of incredibly high production value, but it’s all effective. He has managed to recruit a distributed, free political-messaging group that nobody else has figured out how to harness.

Third…. Obama has found a way to organize his campaign so that when people sign up to volunteer, they’re actually given the organizational model and the tools and the emotional support they need to go out and convince other people to vote.

and

If Obama is Swift-boated, as doubtless he will be, my guess is that the response that’s going to come from pro-Obama forces who aren’t working for Obama is probably going to be more effective than just a series of statements from the Obama campaign itself.

Good examples of situations where diversity’s especially helpful. The different interests and styles of people producing the videos (and other content) mean that whether your tastes run to Olbermann or will.i.am or ObamaGirl or whatever, there’s likely to be something that presents Obama’s message to you in a way you’re more likely to be receptive. And for responses to swiftboating, the diverse crowd’s access to a wide variety of different information sources helps pin down the truthiness of the allegations — and their ability to reach out via blogs, social networks, and their contacts in many different communities can help put pressure on the media to cover the story accurately.

The Obama “More perfect union” speech on Facebook: people in general thought it rocked, and gave very concrete reasons why. Great discussion, too. [Has any expert or analyst — or mainstream media — mentioned the importance of Obama’s bi-racial background and multi-racial outlook yet? It’s already spawned followup threads on Facebook …] The my reaction thread has more.

One of the other things this compare-and-contrast illustrates is that the combination of opinions of the three “crowds” has insights that you don’t get from any one. For example, none of us watching in the Obama group picked up that a lot of people would see Obama’s comments as in some way disrespectful to his grandmother or to Ferraro.

One of the things that’s easy to do online is get little tastes of other perspectives to keep you balanced. I occasionally post questions in Ron Paul discussion groups: it’s interesting to hear what people there think about questions like speakers for Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (Bob Barr — who spoke several years ago, and was great, and yeah, maybe we should invite him back) and “Will Ron Paul Win Pennsylvania?”. And a glimpse at sites like NRO from time to time makes me appreciate it even more when somebody like Charles Murray makes an excellent post.* Meghan McCain’s got interesting things to say( in her GQ blog interview, for example) that I haven’t seen elsewhere** … and so on.

** March 27: Libby Copeland’s Fortunate Daughter in the Washington Post also looks at Meghan McCain; while it makes some very good points, I found the overall tone rather condescending and disrespectful. How come Libby and her editors make such a point of including “like” and “you know” in so many of Meghan’s and the other blogettes quotes? Public figures say things like this all the time; the convention is to edit them out. Unless of course it’s a woman in her 20s who “strokes the blond ponytail that lies over her shoulder like a mink stole” and emits “joyful giggles”, in which case the rules are apparently different. Disappointing.

According to online traffic-monitoring service Compete, 1.7 million people visited Barackobama.com in January, the latest period for which data is available. That’s triple the number of people who visited the campaign’s site in December, and double the number of people who visited rival Hillary Clinton’s site for the same period.

Tim Dickinson’s The Machinery of Hope in Rolling Stone covers some similar ground, with an emphasis on the combination of online and off and laudatory quotes from experienced political consultants. I found this perspective from Cuauhtémoc “Temo” Figueroa, organizer of the “Camp Obama” training sessions, particularly interesting:

Figueroa’s goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers,” he says. “We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.”

I’ve been hanging out on Facebook much more than MyBO: there are only so many hours in a day! For me, it’s much more interesting to integrate the activism with the rest of my life and see how to repurpose existing technology. Smaller activist groups or political campaigns won’t be able to custom-build their own applications, although presumably over time the functionality in MyBO will become available more broadly via services like CivicSpace. Also, it’s often much more effective to meet people where they already are; Facebook and MySpace and Ning (etc.) are the existing communities.

From the Obama campaign’s perspective, the “crowd” is the network-of-networks — once again, diversity at the meta-level. Once again, none of the coverage addresses this — or, for that matter, any other aspect of diversity. Oh well.

Are there systematic differences between people who use social network sites and those who stay away, despite a familiarity with them? Based on data from a survey administered to a diverse group of young adults, this article looks at the predictors of SNS usage, with particular focus on Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster. Findings suggest that use of such sites is not randomly distributed across a group of highly wired users. A person’s gender, race and ethnicity, and parental educational background are all associated with use, but in most cases only when the aggregate concept of social network sites is disaggregated by service. Additionally, people with more experience and autonomy of use are more likely to be users of such sites. Unequal participation based on user background suggests that differential adoption of such services may be contributing to digital inequality.

Ms. Hargittai surveyed more than 1,000 freshmen at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which has one of the nation’s most ethnically diverse student bodies.

White students tend to gravitate toward Facebook, she found, while Hispanic students are much likelier to have MySpace pages. Asian and Asian-American students prefer Facebook, but they also use other social-networking sites, like Xanga and Friendster, that are less popular with other ethnic groups.

Other issues are at play as well. Students whose parents have lower levels of schooling are likely to use MySpace, while students whose parents have more formal education lean toward Facebook. And students who live at home are much less likely to frequent social networks than are their classmates who live on the campus.

It’s not surprising that different communities tend to prefer one site or another. (A historic example: in the instant messaging area, a few years ago Yahoo! introduced ethnically diverse avatars, and over the course of a year or so there was noticeable movement in the black community from AIM to Yahoo!) This is yet another example of how multiple networks provide more diversity than a single network.

Much more troubling is the potential contribution to digital inequality: how to include the people who aren’t part of any online crowd?

It seems logical then that Obama, in his speeches, has been using the pronoun “we” far more often than “I.” This is emblematic of the open-source nature of the Obama conversation. Alan Moore and Tomi T. Ahonen elaborate on Henry Jenkins’ comment that “Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement:” “Movements engage people around higher order ideals and beliefs, they ask people to become self-motivated. Barack Obama understands that people want to be part of the process….” And who doesn’t want to be part of something larger than oneself — a cause, a network, a movement of like-minded and yet diverse voices? It is this inherent transcendence that lends Obama his power. It is a lesson in how to build brands in the age of hyper-fragmentation: When your brand’s essence — in this case: aspiration — is a vector, your base becomes a movement.

The web 2.0 analogy does not end with content production and viral distribution. The “product” Obama itself is a mash-up, a (hyper)-text, a rich media (re)-mix of statements, tunes, vibes, opinions, and facts. Obama embodies what Manuel Castells calls the “networked society,” and he not so much taps into the aggregated “wisdom of the crowd” but the collective intelligence of engaged and enlightened citizens.

Aggregated “wisdom” is only one form of wisdom of the crowds; I’m using it here in the more general sense of “collective intelligence” … in other words, I think we’re in violent agreement.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

Indeed. (Thanks, Dillon!)

Towards the end, the article notes

Young people also identify online discussions with friends and videos as important sources of election information. The habits suggest that younger readers find themselves going straight to the source, bypassing the context and analysis that seasoned journalists provide.

Good point, and it would have been nice to hear more about this. Given all the discussion of the gaps in coverage and biases and sexism of the mainstream media’s “context and analysis”, As Hali Cespedes-Chorin said on the Facebook thread, maybe it’s because we’ve realized that many “seasoned journalists” have – at best – been lying down on the job for, say, the last decade or more. Seems to me like a good example of representation distance. Since it’s in the business section, it might be interesting to explore what implications this has for the various media companies, Google, and Facebook.

The article also doesn’t mention discussion groups’ very important role of ultra-rapid sharing of information — people in the One Million Strong group often post links to broadcasts-in-progress quickly enough that we can join in and watch things as they’re happening. And since the crowd as a whole monitors sooo many diverse information sources (small subset here), far more than any one person could, it’s tremendously efficient. I wonder if the NY Times doesn’t understand this, or simply doesn’t think it’s important?

Still, as the excerpts I highlighted show, Brian puts his finger on a couple of important points. It’s nice to see America’s newspaper of record recognize that’s something happening here, even if what it is ain’t exactly clear. Hopefully they’ll build on this and look at it more deeply.

Barack Obama’s How can we engage more people in the democratic process? had 17416 (!) responses. Rather than voting, the asker [presumably Barack or a staff member] chose the best response, which focused on teenagers, the schools, and community. That and several others had over 1000 thumbs up.

Yahoo! Answers has a fairly diverse population, and both of these groups are large enough to get wisdom-of-crowds effects. If you look at the top 2-3% of responses in each one, it’s a pretty good collection of well-articulated different views, with lots of value. Impressive. And as elsewhere, the Obama campaign has a significant advantage in participation; as a result, there are (at least so it seems to me) more good responses for them to take advantage of — and more people who are now a little more deeply engaged with the campaign.

A couple of things jump out in addition to the factor-of-five difference in participation. First of all, the question Obama asked is something that more people on Yahoo! Answers are likely to be able to feel comfortable providing input on. And secondly, unlike YouTube, Facebook, digg, and the Huffington Post, Yahoo! Answers doesn’t seem to have caught on as a significant social network being used by the campaigns.

A very concrete example of the kinds of value from One Million Strong for Barack and other Facebook groups: Matt Adler, a 22-year-old student at Washington University in Missouri, posted there earlier this week asking for support in his bid to become a delegate to help give younger voters a voice. He set up a group, and made his case, starting with

I am running to become a pledged delegate for Barack Obama to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) because we deserve a voice at the table. The 75,000 votes of people aged 18-29 helped Senator Obama carry Missouri on Super Tuesday, where we won by a mere 10,000 votes. We’ve worked hard and we want to be heard.

Senator Obama inspires me to believe that we young people have the ability to shape our own future. This campaign has moved me to reach beyond myself and think that I too can make change happen. I’ve been an activist on issues of immigrants’ rights, workers’ rights, gay rights, Katrina relief, and Middle East peace. If we are to succeed on these and other issues, we must work together to build a youth movement.

I joined, and sent him some potentially-helpful suggestions (tapping the folks mentioned in the Obama’s MySpace Delegates article, for example). 260 others joined, a lot of whom were local and were able to do a lot more.

Tonight we got this message from Matt:

YES WE DID!!!

I am so proud and friggin ecstatic to announce that…

I will be representing the 3rd Congressional District of Missouri for Barack Obama! I couldn’t have done it without your support, whether it be leafleting the caucus tonight or just being there for me. You better believe I will represent your voices to the best of my capacity and work my heart out to continue to get young people elected wherever I can. Thank you so much for your support! Yes we DID!!!

There’s another impressive example of the One Million Strong group’s impact in the Election falsification in Ohio thread. Here’s a summary; see that thread for more context and links.

A great example of the not-so-hidden power of social networks: a 26-year-old from Butler County Ohio posted a story on Newsvines and then a link in a thread in the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group. I did some research with the aid of a couple other Facebookers (including a college student in Florida whose Mom lived in Ohio) and wrote up a blog entry, updating it for a few days as new information came up. After I sent it to Kim, she did some more research and blogged about it on Wired’s THREAT LEVEL blog.

Ari saw it on Wired, talked about it on CSPAN, and after Rush attacked him did a nice piece on The Nation’s blog: Limbaugh’s Lying Voters Under Investigation. [The funny thing is, I actually know Ari via email — he did a long piece about Facebook for The Nation’s print edition in January that I saw on TPM; he quoted my response in his followup post and we’ve stayed in touch — but hadn’t thought of sending this to him.]

Ohio newspapers and TV stations had reported before the election that lying on crossover pledges was illegal; discussions all over the political blogosphere had discussed the effect of Limbaugh-inspired crossover votes. Nobody (outside of Ohio) put the two of them together.

The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

Here’s a situation where I bet it’s the lack of diversity in the age and cultural dimensions that accentuate the problem. The core of the Clinton campaign doesn’t appear to have involved anybody who’s spent a lot of time living in an online social network world, so it’s not surprising that they’re thinking in such “old-school” ways.

We think of Hillary as the ultimate political hot potato, but Schilling has been relatively free to shape her article because, oddly, the substance of her life is not nearly as controversial on Wikipedia as Barack Obama’s. Beyond arguments over the state of the race–like the recent fight over the word “leading”–the attacks on Hillary’s page mainly take the form of crude vandalism…

It’s different on Obama’s page, where the fans–no surprise–are more enthusiastic, the haters are more intelligent, and the arguments reflect the fact that Obama himself is still a work under construction….

The Obama page has become such a firestorm–it’s had more than twice as many changes as Hillary’s page in the last week, and a Wikipedia administrator restricted editing to let things cool down–that it has shattered another of Wikipedia’s fundamental mores: what Wikipedians refer to as WP:AGF, or “assume good faith….”

The bitterness of the fights on Obama’s page could be taken as a bad sign for the candidate. But it may actually be Hillary’s page that contains the more troubling omens. Few, if any, Hillary defenders are standing watch besides Schilling.

i inadvertently managed to delete some comments here highlighting the breadth of the responses to the ABC debate on their site, and contrasting with the much more limited view of the pundits and media. i think there may also have been some references to a few other good articles. drat. i hate it when i do that.

[…] Indeed/pwn2own/RSA sequence on security and static analysis, and the Gender, race, age, and power/Cognitive diversity in the 2008 US election pair focused on the nexus of social computing, oppression theory, intersectionality, and diversity. […]

Darlene Jones-Owens started up a thread asking people’s age. Results so far, grouped by the decade in which people are born:

1940s – 3
1950s – 2
1960s – 10
1970s- 3
1980s- 49
1990s- 7

Total = 74

The gap in the “70s” cohort (29-39) is kind of weird … you’d expect it to be somewhere between the 80s and 60s. as it is, almost 80% of the people there are 28-and-under, aka “Facebook generation”. Still, the healthy sprinkling of old codgers like me is a great example of diversity in action.

Another important dimension of diversity: geography. If you stop to think about it, the One Million Strong group is likely to be as diverse in this dimension than any other group its size. Here’s an attempt to leverage that advantage. Here’s what I posted (sans formatting alas) on Facebook:

ACTIVISM: “Swing State Newspaper Project”

Adam Terando on OpenLeft has kicked off a very cool grassroots pro-Obama activism campaign, and could really use help from any One Million Strong for Barack members who live in any of 20 swing states: Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, …

“If you’ve ever spent time reading local and regional newspaper sites on the internet, you’ve probably noticed a disturbing phenomenon; right-wingers have run amok in the comments sections of the newspapers. Progressives may rule blogs and online fundraising and organizing, but when it comes to influencing more traditional media, even if it’s in an internet forum, we lag behind. Sometimes far behind. This becomes increasingly problematic as we draw closer to the election. Many more voters read online newspapers than read blogs. So it becomes very important to not only rebut these ignoramuses, but to provide additional context and knock down bad information in news articles covering the presidential race.”

Indeed. And he also had an idea about how to counter this:

“… monitor online newspaper sites in key swing states until the election. Readers would comment on stories, knock down attacks, add truth to the discussion, and in many cases, contact reporters directly to encourage better reporting (if they got it wrong) or thank them for outstanding writing (if they got it right).”

The most effective comments are courteous, polite, and informative [duh] — and come from local residents: subscribers (or potential subscribers!) and online readers the paper’s local advertisers want to target. So for this to work best, we’d want a large and geographically diverse group to help.

Gee, I said to myself, do I know a group of people like that?

Hey! I do!

Adam’s been posting daily updates in a thread on OpenLeft: five online newspaper articles related to the campaign where comments and/or followups would be particularly helpful. On days when you’ve got a few moments, please check it out and see if there’s a conversation you can add to — or a reporter you want to tip your hat to.

And if it’s out-of-state for you, but you know somebody there who might help, send it along!

[…] collaboratively on the wiki and message board and email and IM, getting input from over 20 people. Cognitive diversity in action: we had lawyers, journalists, techies, ad execs, marketing people, a professional comedian, and […]

[…] There are over 700,000 people in the One Million Strong group Facebook alone, and after a lot of success in the primary, we’re getting steadily more ambitious: an online convention, an upcoming moneybomb, targeted […]

[…] progressive blogosphere has almost completely ignored Obama activism on Facebook so far (although the mainstream media has paid some attention) … at some point they’ll wake up, and it might as well be now. So if you know any […]

[…] social network activism in general, looking at some of the experiences I discuss in Reflections and Cognitive diversity and the US 2008 Election. With the election right around the corner, though, we’ll probably be devoting the bulk of […]

[…] an “upgrade or die” policy for old-style groups, it’s a stressful time for One Million Strong for Barack. As the Erratic Synapse writes in Facebook Stands Poised to Take Our Group of Over 980,000 Obama […]